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That's the error in your model. If you think supporting trans kids is good, or open borders is good then whether it costs money or makes money is not the relevant distinction if you are not a consequentialist.
Consider the evangelical wing of the Republican party, they were still pushing for further abortion restrictions even though much of the polling was showing that was a position that might cost votes. Why? Because they really truly believe that it is wrong, and they should not compromise on that even if it means losing. They are not utilitarian. But they did not hold enough power within the party to force that decision and so Trump backed off it somewhat. Pragmatism won there. De-emphasize and move away from policies that are unpopular.
Supporting kids who want to transition will not help the economy or help people with healthcare in general, in fact it will probably cost money that could be used in other healthcare. But if you think those kids need that help badly ,then you should do it (from this point of view to be clear!) even if it costs votes and/or money.
They are NOT being pragmatic, so if you try to judge them by that measure their choices will look crazy.
"Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say, ‘No, you move.'”"
In other words currently the ideologues hold sway within the DNC. Usually in a political party you'll have wings that are more pragmatic and vice versa and the power will move between them. Often a defeat will cause a realignment. Like New Labour moving towards the center in order to get away from all the "Winter of Discontent" strikes in the past which doomed them electorally against Thatcher. Pragmatically (or cynically!) abandoning some core Labour principles in order to become more electable. But those wings don't go away (see the resurgence under Corbyn for example).
It's too soon to know whether this loss will allow a more pragmatic core of the DNC to maneuver into power. A lot will depend on who the next flagbearer (Newsome?, AOC?, Someone new?) is going to be, and what direction they decide to go. Right now things are still shaking out, but within the next 6-10 months we'll have a better idea. I think there is some early evidence it might, as the more extreme left is already complaining about Democrats not fighting back enough, and that the handover of power was straightforward and peaceful. That indicates that the adults at the table have some understanding that Trumps popularity is based upon actual positional support at least privately.
To be clear I think that political parties need to be pragmatic, a lot of my job back in the day was to advise them on what areas should be de-emphasized because public support was low, and I think that the Democratic Party is going to struggle once again in 2028 unless they are able to shed some of the more ideological components (though if the economy tanks that will still be the biggest factor).
The problem of course is it is often your most committed ideologues which are willing to volunteer significant amounts of time and effort to your cause. Keeping them on side while transitioning (hah!) to a more pragmatic approach can be tricky.
Except the essentially-pragmatic wing of the democrats was in power recently- that's what Biden was, that's what the black political machine is, that's what the gerontocrats mostly are. They still do the stupid woke unpopular stuff. The gerontocrats vote for trans kids. Biden was big into woke.
Remember who looks to be in charge does not mean they are.
Consider that David Cameron agreed to a referendum on Brexit he did not want because of the internal politics of his party. He was reliant on the euro-sceptic wing and so was forced into calling for a referendum he explicitly campaigned against. He was in power, but he wasn't THE power. He was constrained in his actions by having to satisfy ideological power blocs within his party. He was pragmatic but he needed the ideologues. So he compromised his principles for power.
Further to that Biden won in 2020, you only have to dial your pragmatism up when you fail to win. Otherwise you can satisfy your ideologues and STILL get power. Biden is an experienced politician whose positions shifted overtime. Which ones are his real principles and which he was just wearing because his party politics wanted them, is very difficult to tell.
Thats why it is often losses or long periods in the cold that cause these realignments. Its easy to "be" an ideologue when you're winning. It's what you do when you're losing which shows whether you are an ideologue or are willing to sacrifice principles for power.
This is probably incorrect - at the time Cameron agreed to the referendum there weren't enough Brexit-supporting Tory MPs to force the issue, and the grassroots have very little ability to change the direction of the Conservative Party other than by selecting the candidate for an open seat. The conventional wisdom in UK politics is that Cameron promised the referendum to stop the Conservatives leaching votes to UKIP and losing seats to Labour as a result. If so it didn't work (UKIP did well in the 2015 general election) and wasn't needed (UKIP's performance didn't cost the Conservatives many seats - in fact they won a surprise majority). Dominic Cummings claims that this was obvious if you actually spoke to UKIP-curious voters and that promising the referendum was an unforced error.
Remember when Cameron promised the referendum in 2013 he was in charge with a coalition. That gave groups an out-sized power. There absolutely were enough in the euro-sceptic camp to cause him problems with votes because he didn't even have a majority on his own. The conventional wisdom as shown below was primarily because of the euro-sceptics with SOME others because they feared UKIP would cost them seats. But the biggest concern was the euro-sceptic bloc. Without them he probably could have wrangled the rest, because it was the euro-sceptic wing which was feeding the fears of the others. Cameron did not want a referendum. He did so because of the pressure he was under driven primarily by the euro-sceptic power bloc which was able to muster first 60, then 80 MPs to defy the government in votes, then over a hundred demanding a referendum. He only had 306 MPs at this time so over 100 is definitely enough to force any issue. As they did when they rebelled and sided with Labour.
"For Clegg, the reason Cameron moved to a referendum commitment was to manage his divided party.19 Echoing Harold Wilson’s 1975 European Community plebiscite, rather than a conversion to the merits of direct democracy, Cameron needed a mechanism to control an issue that was destabilising his party.20 As early as October 2011 Cameron had ‘faced 22 rebellions on Europe, involving 60 Tory backbenchers’.21 However, the pressure ratcheted upwards later in October when 81 Conservative MPs voted for a referendum in defiance of a three line whip. Both Cameron and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, spoke forcefully against the motion in the House of Commons yet could not prevent a larger rebellion than anything seen during the Maastricht legislation in 1992.22 Political pressure from Conservative MPs continued to grow. In June 2012 John Barron MP collected over 100 signatures from Conservative colleagues asking Cameron to commit to a referendum after the 2015 general election.23 The PM publicly rejected this from Brussels which angered his critics and eroded his ‘authority over the party’.24 Pressure rose further in October 2012 when Conservative rebels united with Labour to defeat Cameron in Parliament over EU budget contributions."
"Cameron chose to commit to a vote, not because the country’s population was clamouring for one but because a significant minority of his own MPs, many of them frustrated by the constraints of coalition, were demanding that he do so – some because they feared that UKIP would cost them their seat (or the seats of too many of their colleagues) at the next election, some because they wanted out of the European Union and were more than happy to leverage that fear to their advantage."
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Biden won thanks to the basically-pragmatic black wing of the party rigging the vote-counting in a handful of major cities. He was beholden to pragmatic types who didn't want to be a trans-issues party and are often mildly uncomfortable with LGB, nevermind T. He got along badly with the idealogues and was closer to the gerontocrats than to the progressives.
The progressive idealogues still got everything they wanted- despite Biden assembling an extremely moderate political staff which was frustrated with the progressives.
Setting aside I think you're just wrong about the vote rigging, and that the black voting bloc has its own ideological things it wanted from Democrats, that make it willing to put up with some LGBT stuff, thats just reinforcing my point, the ideologues in the DNC were the ones pulling the strings, they had good control over congressional Democrats, doesn't matter how many moderate officials you appoint. Doesn't matter if the President is a pragmatist who just wants power, as long as he has it theres no point in going to war with the ideologues on his own side.
Sure trans kids, sure DEI and affirmative action even if unpopular. Sure flipping your own views from a few years ago upside down, Why would they care? The pragmatist just wants to win. If he can win without having to dial down his own side, so much the better, its political capital he doesn't need to spend.
Just to say, a black pastor telling his church 'y'all going to vote for the champion of African American values (who is Mr. Goodwhiteguy) tommorow' and 90% of them dutifully doing so may not seem like vote rigging (and is not) but it absolutely does stink. Black machine politics is dirty as it gets and the only reason it doesn't get more attention is because it's embarassing to the liberal press, who would rather glaze them.
Well when we start enforcing the Johnson amendment on any church there is some room to talk about that. Given the amount of religious endorsements Trump got, its a wash, or perhaps even tilted towards Republicans just given numbers.
Either churches get to endorse or they don't. (I'd prefer not myself) but singling out black churches is just an isolated demand for rigor currently.
Also happy to remove tax exemption from both black and white churches just to be clear.
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Well the Brexit referendum actually winning was a pretty unlikely outcome at the time Cameron approved it, so it seemed like a rather small bone to throw to the base.
Indeed, but it was still a bone he had to throw. He isn't in power without that bone.
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It can be argued that a lot of these things actually suit the class interests of the symbolic capitalist class.
Immigration, for example, is defended by the business elite on economic grounds. These people are not overly rich but they often work to manage these corporations and are not directly threatened by Uber drivers and can in fact make use of them to benefit from services that are far cheaper than they would be in a tighter labour market.
Censorship isn't even hard. It's a demand that power be taken from unaccountable social media billionaires (or just the general public) and placed in the hands of another group of allied bureaucrats in an organization filled with people they went to school with. Journalists and other groups demand outsized respect in the name of the special role they play in a democracy: informing people and, now, fighting "hate".
It's a noble lie. But a noble lie with some value.
This doesn't mean that they're actually purely pragmatic. In a more responsive system they would have tossed the worst excesses like trans nonsense overboard. But a religion acts on the elites who coopt it just as the elites act on it. The Saudis lived under some constraints too.
Well all ideologies do, not just religions, but regardless of that in politics you will inevitably have a mix of true believers, slightly less true believers all the way down to people who don't believe at all and are just in it for advantage. And you will also have a mix of exactly what ideology or what part of the ideology they believe or value most. So it's certainly more complicated than just pragmatists vs ideologues, I agree. You'll also have your alliance of groups (Evangelicals, business neo-liberals etc.) who also have their own internal balance of pragmatists vs ideologues.
You will have people who do not in fact care about the ideology whatsoever, but are in it for the power. They will push the most pragmatic approach (do whatever we can to win) and will be in tension with the truest believers (maintain our principles at all costs), and they will have varying webs of people who are on the scale at different levels and in different parts of the coalition to convince. That's why pivots are generally not immediate until an internal tipping point is reached.
In my direct experience at a national level most politicians are closer to the pragmatist end and will pretty happily jettison any principle they can get away with for power. It interests me that the Democrats may have accrued more true believers (or at the least truer believers) as it stands, because I think that generally makes it harder to win.
Until just recently there was no need for this kind of hard discussion between pragmatists and true believers because both were winning. It didn’t really start to conflict in a big way until after the October 7 attack. Even during the first Trump administration the strategies to resist it were still more or less in sync.
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